Our son Ian became interested in martial arts a couple years ago and at the beginning of this year we enrolled him in Kung Jung Mul Sul (Korean royal court martial arts, related to Tae Kwon Do) classes nearby. As a project, Ian wanted to build a diorama of his Dojang (Korean counterpart to a Japanese dojo).

There were two main threads of construction for this project: the figures of the fighters and the building itself.

For the building Ian wanted to base his work on the dojo used in the training scenes of The Matrix.

We built a wooden box and Ian and AJ made detailed walls which were mounted inside.

The figures were made out of polymer clay over a copper wire armature. I soldered up armatures while Ian and AJ prepared clay to build up the figures.

Meanwhile, back at the dojang, Ian built up the walls out of styrene and balsa wood.

Corey loves movies and movie-themed projects. His last project was a mostly scratch-built diorama of a scene from the movie Milk. Taking a bit of a break, Corey chose a Polar Lights kit of the Mystery Machine van from the old animated series Scooby Doo.

The figure painting was perhaps the hardest part of the project.

The kit comes with stickers (!) for the decoration of the van sides. My past experience with this kit is that the stickers do not lay down well on the compound curves of the van body so we did some trial and error learning to make our own decals for the sides.

One day Sarah was working on making figures for the first time using polymer clay. Breton decided to try making figures too as they were following along in a book. Breton’s first foray into polymer sculpture was The Elf.

Having made an elf, Breton wanted to make a small world for him. He decided the elf was a lawyer who lived in the woods. He quickly came up with this concept sketch.

And he started working on this design for a diorama.

As the project grew we needed a quick oven to fit the entire project into. What we came up with is a glorified easy-bake oven with four 200 watt bulbs.

I know Breton was pretty sick of working on it by the end but all his hard work has created a really beautiful project.

This is a quick progress update and a state-of-the-project report. Erik is one of our railroad-minded students. In the spring we brainstormed ideas by collecting and organizing photos of scenes that Erik liked.

We found several trends in the photos that Erik liked and the one we focused on was trains in and around Sausalito. In the 20s and 30s Sausalito had a large passenger facility with electric, steam, standard gauge and narrow gauge trains connecting to ferry boats to San Francisco.

After we negotiated a footprint size for the project, Erik started by making a foam base.

Erik has completed the bay shore with rocks.

Laid all the track and preparing the electric third-rails — actually fourth-rails in this case because the Northwestern Pacific had dual standard-narrow gauge track at this station. Erik also painted the rails and the ties.